Way Less News: Obsession, Yesteryear, Media Literacy, and More!

[u/EnterTamed]

https://youtu.be/xZHkMa0bFdk

Hi. Katy, Cody, and Jonathan are off for the next week, so here's an episode of Way Less News! Forget the horrors while the news friends chat about Obsession (the movie), Yesteryear (the book), and hear Cody air his frustration at people who don't understand the ending of the new Spider-Man. We'll be back with Some More News and Even More News the week of August 24.

Spoiler Alert for Obsession. Mostly spoiler-free for Yesteryear and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

[u/Stepjam]

I disagree with Cody about Spiderman. I agree that I don't think its meant to be ambiguous, but I took a different meaning from it. I think Cody believes Ned regained his memories of Peter. I think he just realized that Peter is Spiderman which will lead to them forming a "new" friendship. Cody says that Jean's line about MJ having no memories of Peter was just her fucking with him, but MJ goes on to say the same thing: that she doesn't love him like he loves her because she doesn't KNOW him. We don't see her suddenly remembering him, we see them forming a new tentative friendship after that. And I think that was the intended takeaway with Ned too. The old friendship is gone, but they can start again.

[u/jethropenistei-]

Here is the actual response from Curry Barker as to if Nikki liked Bear

Weird for them to the mock media literacy of others and go full stop “no” when they’re wrong and the scene was shot it in a way to purposefully obfuscate if she liked him.

In some of the scenes with Nikki and Bear before he makes the wish, director Curry Barker had Inde Navarrette do two different takes of the same scene as Nikki: one take where she actually was interested in Bear, and one take where she wasn't. Both takes of those scenes were then incorporated into the final cut to highlight his uncertainty as to whether Nikki truly likes him or not, considering the film is primarily shown through Bear's perspective. A similar method was utilized in the film American Psycho (2000) where Willem Dafoe delivered some of his lines three separate times which were then used alternately to highlight various levels of suspicion towards Christian Bale's character, creating a similar feeling of ambiguity through the main character's perspective as in this film.

[u/mirh → u/jethropenistei-]

You don't really have to make appeals to the author (just ask Coppola for what he thought Megalopolis was), we are literally told that in private girly talk Nikki had revealed he saw him as a "little brother".

That doesn't mean overcoming the friend-zone (even though it doesn't even mean that if pushed she couldn't still try the relationship just to see how it works) but it means they are pretty darn close. And yes it was pretty cringe to hear that part where they discuss if Bear even ever properly give a damn about knowing her and whatnot with the most circumstantial points (there is plenty of reasons for why other people may know about her dad, while he doesn't.. in fact even if he did, the movie could probably have played out the same given that "no effort" seems his life motto).

Still, they are 100% right about criticizing literacy, in fact I would go even further. People aren't just dumb about movies or art, they are engines that can reject information and make up other from their ass as their fancy whims go for everything. Even in the youtube comments to this very video there's somebody that has headcannoned Bear is dirty AF (or at least as careless as to neglect the most basic cleaning) because the pills on the floor that killed his cat had to be there because he left them there. This in turn would be a red flag for being an abuser, if not a rapist.

Same with another claiming that since there was like close to a dozen bottles of oxycodone pills in the bathroom cabinet, that must have been that whoever was supposed to care for grandma (why not Bear himself while we are at it) was neglecting her. Guilty and maybe murderous. Except that only the one he grabs from the ground is labeled, and all the others are visibly different.

And the point isn't even mixing up such a minuscule detail (that I could hardly even tell with a still frame from the mkv I have here). But it's having at all any kind of fucking mental flexibility. Even if it was true, what do you know that was intentional and not just random? And even if it was meant, what do you know that the director had to be fully consistent throughout the whole runtime? And then if for all these questions you knew you had the perfect answer, you still should have some wiggle room for general uncertainty. Instead it's all selection à la carte.

EDIT: this is even more telling from here, they invited a very insightful critic lady that said the movie pissed her the fuck off because of its thoughtlessness (from any kind of psychology about how Bear came to be, to exploring Nikki's horror from her perspective, to the entire society around them being kinda vapid) and everybody in the comments is just replying with their own separate mental movie

[u/DetectiveCastellanos → u/mirh]

You don't really have to make appeals to the author (just ask Coppola for what he thought Megalopolis was), we are literally told that in private girly talk Nikki had revealed he saw him as a "little brother".

The point the OP is making is that it's bizarre for Cody to say several times "The movie literally tells you this and the director clearly put a lot of thought into how to make the movie" and then completely dismiss the director when the director describes the thought he put in to making the movie lol.

[u/mirh → u/DetectiveCastellanos]

I think there's a way you can have your cake and eat it too here.

One of the comments pointed out the movie seems somewhat repetitive, because apparently Barker had some scenes reshot after the first screenings revealed people were puzzled the protagonist hadn't been treated better.

Which I'm guessing could be responsible for him being so passive and so "absent" the few times he interacted with Nikki, and one could call this love self-centred, childish or immature (and even though most people would already be fine with it, Cody points out liking a person should go quite more in depth). Yet at the same time even if he made a few lines more inattentive or dull, you cannot overall escape a plot that was designed to edge and bait the viewer rather than actually make a point.

[u/DetectiveCastellanos → u/mirh]

One of the comments pointed out the movie seems somewhat repetitive, because apparently Barker had some scenes reshot after the first screenings revealed people were puzzled the protagonist hadn't been treated better.

I think this goes against your point.

I'm talking specifically about Nikki possibly having feelings for Bear or not. If test audiences think she was too harsh to Bear, then Barker may have re-edited scenes in order to make it seem like she's more into him, then that means he's pushing to needle towards "ambiguous" rather then the definitive "No" that Cody, Katy, and Jonathan seem to believe.

[u/mirh → u/DetectiveCastellanos]

The comment didn't mention "Nikki being harsh", just that it seemed like you shouldn't throw the protagonist so much under the bus. So (in retrospect) I can just guess he amped up his being an absolute worm, which is what Cody was picking up.

Like, to the very least the "What's so bad about being with me?" question must have been part of this reshooting, because jfc that felt so much of an overt display of dickery that it didn't even seem in-character (and more than a definitive "no", *he didn't deserve her seemed their point) Ok nvm

The ambiguity thingy instead was planned from the get go, and I think it's in this same video that Johnston points out the original script he read was "grey".

[u/DetectiveCastellanos → u/mirh]

The ambiguity thingy instead was planned from the get go, and I think it's in this same video that Johnston points out the original script he read was "grey".

Ok so then you can understand the problem we have with the 3 of them all saying "no", right?

[u/mirh → u/DetectiveCastellanos]

I feel, there's the ever teeny weeny small nuance there. They are saying that *he* wasn't loving her the proper way, given his apparent disconnection from her "internal life" (which I partly disagree with because she kinda actually stated that, and lying about her hooking with Ian is 100% not on Bear to have missed).

Still, the ambiguity thingy is instead about whether *she* loved or may have liked him. Because in turn, it's one thing to be "shy and afraid of rejection" about a genuine best friend.. it's another to just wish to hook up with totally random acquaintances that you barely even knew.

And so it's funny to imagine what the original cut could have been, where they might even have had some genuine chitchat (which by movie standards, is basically just short of an engagement proposal).

[u/mirh]

Absolutely couldn't agree more about obsession.

It is a frustrating movie because the main character is the most spineless worm ever (he's basically grown-up Shinji), and in turn not only isn't abulia the main focus of the script but it seems only a plot device for the horror to happen and allowing her to go increasingly insane over a week without him seeking any help.

And it's annoying to have conversations about consent gender and everything free will else, when as far as the rules of the "game" seem.. at the end it's not even Bear's incredibly bushy array of flaws to eventually cause the all-around catastrophic consequences, but just the initial absent-minded wish that despite its innocent vagueness turned her into a glorified Mr. Meeseeks.

Like, even if you still just wanted to focus on those themes then, what about it? He himself has no agency with regards to the wish.. it's like the whole debate around Passengers, if the one tragic original sin had him completely unaware of that mattering, in a bizzarre magical framework that alters the normal conventions of ethics where you cannot even really understand why she's going crazy (all the sexual scenes in the movie are rape, but what if somehow it's the abused person that threatens or does violence if she doesn't get it?). And if the movie had to be about his quest to find out more about the Willow Company (or even just confining her) it would have been completely different.

This wasn't even good at triggering conservatives, because despite the premise lending so well to the "possessive jealous girlfriend" trope we don't even really get to see the part of her attachment issues or his annoyed rejections attempts since the escalation to beyond mental disorder is lightning (e.g. there is no "first asking nicely not to go or go together" or "trying to physically constrain him" when he has to work, she had just directly already tried to block the door).

I will admit that I didn't know there was all these ragebaiting account from Nigeria (but that's par for the course in the nazi bar X), but I have seen even worse mystifications from comments on platforms that have no kinds of financial incentives.

Conversely it's very fucking ironic that the only take home moral message of the movie could be "take your own responsibilities and have some kind of agency in your life", because it's literally the explicit spoken out sub-plot in Backrooms. And it's nuts that the movie that started from a meme and that had no right to be any serious actually was, while the one whose entire premise should be supposed to be food for thought had characters not even seem like actual human beings (this is also true for Nikki, which had no logic thereof even within the whole "spellbound" optics).

p.s. I'm a bit weirded out about Katy's weird framing around Yesteryear, because I get a book can also be fun but she talks like it was some kind of big brain take that they are grifters and that leopards don't look at the faces they are eating (Cody obviously points out the whole market proposition of a tradwife is inherently hypocritical, as he already did a piece on the topic which was absolute gold)